The past is always better
published: July 20th, 2008
The Past Is Always Better
image: legacy recordings
Be honest, don’t you wish you’d lived through the sixties in Swinging London or shooting the breeze up at Haight Ashbury? What would it have been like to be there when Elvis first gyrated and sent a tsunami of shock through the sensibilities of upstanding folk throughout the world?
Karl Marx, think of the effect he had on the twentieth century, worked away quietly and unnoticed in the reading room of the British Museum coming up with a thesis that would radically change our world.
Think of the great happenings in world history and how it would have been to be in the wash of them. Whatever for you are the high points of the human narrative thus far, would you have recognised them if you’d been there?
How many people actually recognised the uniqueness of Elvis, Karl Marx, or swung in the sixties? How many people would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Galileo as the Inquisition turned its gaze upon him and forced him to renounce what he knew to be the case?
Listen my friends, the only truth you have access to is now. I read that we are living in an age without ideas, without thinking and perhaps this is so, certainly the writer thought so but then they had copy to shift.
What chills me is the thought of being alive in an age whose only contribution to the human story was to exacerbate its difficulties with an age of unparallelled hedonism. What radical steps forward have we taken in your lifetime? Oh sure, they’re there, but mostly they exist as avant garde or underground movements.
What ideas do you think are going to come from our age that will alter the human story in a positive way?
It’s one thing to be a pundit or a commentator, it’s something quite different to actually contribute and try to create something new and fresh. Anyone can shoot the piano player or be a gilt edged critic, to bring something different to the table is quite different and requires courage, chutzpah, desire and to be driven in ways that don’t require a hedonistic prize at the end.
Life is such an indescribable gift in itself that it is the prize already before time. The greatest gift surely is to be able to add to the consciousness of the Universe. That is all of us who are sentient in whatever form we may manifest and wherever we appear.